An Occasional Dream
by a solitary summer
Summary: Wesley wants normal. Mid season three character vignette. Light slash.


**Title:** An Occasional Dream

**Author:** solitary summer

**Rating:** PG-13

**Disclaimer:** Not mine, obviously. Joss said, Go forth and write. Title stolen from the same-named song by David Bowie. And dare I even admit that two names are borrowed from Thomas Mann?

**Notes:** Set before _Waiting in the Wings._ Unbeta'd. Not a native speaker.

o**o**o

**An Occasional Dream**

When the Council appointed him Buffy's watcher, Wesley's colleagues organised a farewell party: not that he wasn't quite glad to leave or that anyone even feigned being sorry to see him go, but it was tradition. There were speeches and congratulations, and, at the edge of his hearing, the malicious whispers. Of course they all knew it was his father's influence that had got him the position, and, like his father, they were all expecting to see him fail and make a fool of himself with that unruly American schoolgirl.

He smiled and thanked them, matching insincerity with insincerity with the ease of long practice, drank too much, something he'd had ample time to regret on the plane the following morning, and pretended to enjoy the lap dance by a Pamela Anderson look-alike in a Baywatch outfit, silently grateful they'd hired a female stripper.

"Sunn_y_dale", Forster had snorted. "At least you'll have a nice holiday. Unless of course you get yourself killed. Try not to." It was sincere. He'd always rather liked Forster.

o**o**o

There are three hundred and twenty-nine sunny days per year in Los Angeles. A statistical average of 5.6 sun hours a day: Wesley has made a point of forgetting the second number behind the comma. People tend to laugh when he says he used to see more of the sun in Britain: they put it down the patriotic bias of someone who's been away from home for too long, or perhaps to foreign humour, he doesn't ask. And maybe he's exaggerating a little, but the life he leads – they all lead – doesn't really lend itself to enjoying the Southern Californian sun or lounging on beaches.

They've all been gravitating towards the dark, gradually arranging their lives the better to suit Angel's nocturnal existence. And no matter how many time-honoured traditions demons may have chosen to discard in this age and place, most of them still are, by preference or necessity, creatures of darkness - at least figuratively speaking. The blinds in Wesley's bedroom are always pulled down, but even so at night patches of shadow and light are moving across the walls in a restless pattern dissolving and reforming itself. He misses little about Britain and less about the place he grew up in, but he occasionally does miss nights that are dark and silent; the soft patter of raindrops on the chestnut tree outside his window and the smell of wet earth drifting into his dreams.

Impossible hours, nightshifts, chasing demons of every denomination through tunnels, sewers and dark alleys, and entirely too many daylight hours spent hunched over books in the artificial light of their office. Offices. Now and then on particularly balmy days the thought of taking his research out into the courtyard has crossed his mind, but in the end it always seems too much of a bother - he's bound to need other volumes for cross-reference, and what is he supposed to do, stack them on the stone bench and sit there with a glass of iced tea beside him, a five hundred year old book dealing with the less savoury habits of the Ochetos demons propped on his knees, getting a tan? Even the idea seems slightly irreverent, and really, he isn't so sure some of his books wouldn't spontaneously combust.

He remains in his office.

o**o**o

So, in hindsight, Wesley blames the sunlight.

Now granted, there were two suns instead of one, both surrounded by an unfamiliar purplish-pink corona, which should have been jarring in and of itself, but was after all only to be expected, considering that, however innocuously bucolic the landscape around them, they were not on Earth, not by a very long way. (Although this, too, might be a figure of speech, depending on which theory on inter-dimensional travel one favours.)

The truly disconcerting thing, however, was not the strangeness, but the brief illusion of familiarity.

The light of the sun – suns - shining on a deceptively commonplace and rather pretty glade, more home-like than the Californian beaches, and Angel, familiar but completely different, looking up at the sky with a stupidly happy grin on is face.

Looking so absurdly, shockingly normal that the fact that his own carelessness (_Shouldn't be necessary, Angel. The car should do it, Angel._) almost might have killed him didn't even register until later.

Sunlight on black leather, eroding his carefully maintained mental boundaries, blurring the painstakingly drawn lines dividing aesthetic appreciation from sexual desire, friendship from… feelings best not examined too closely. Making it permissible to give in to the impulse and reach out; a touch (memory of sun-warmed skin under his fingers) that wasn't comfort or reassurance; that had neither purpose nor pretext, but was pure self-indulgence.

Sunlight, a touch on his cheek, and his eyes had closed, shocked, for a split-second until he remembered to pull away, and for a moment it was so easy, seeing just a man, not the embodiment of an eternal struggle between Good and Evil, the proof that redemption is possible. So easy, so utterly, ridiculously _simple_, wanting this beautiful man, a bright edge of desire cutting through the mess of contradicting emotions - duty and gratitude and loyalty, friendship and pain, and _wanting_, blindly wanting too many things among which sex was the easiest and least complicated

And all of a sudden he caught himself thinking about picket fences and breakfasts in a sun-drenched kitchen and, Lord help him, telling his father he was dating (fucking, father, I'm fucking him and he _likes_ it) a man, and there would be the usual tirade about how he'd always been a failure and disappointment to his parents, and most likely there'd be talk of disinheriting, but this time he'd --

And it wouldn't matter, because that would be the beginning and _end_ of his problems.

Wouldn't matter, because it'd be normal.

Fortunately the subsequent rush of events didn't allow him to dwell on this particular impossibility.

Rescue Cordelia, free the slaves, do the right thing, fight the good fight, in this dimension or any other. Angel's mission, their mission. Save Cordy, because you don't leave anyone of the team behind: you don't leave family behind. And if Cordelia is more than family to Angel, the tang of jealousy lingering beneath an equal mixture of affection and exasperation, something he imagines he would have felt for a sister, if he'd had one, is so familiar and long acknowledged that he barely notices it any more.

Pylea didn't leave him time for regrets, but unfortunately the same could not be said for the months following their return.

_Angel's hand slipping to the back of his head, pulling him close…_

He half-heartedly tried to stop such fantasies before they could run on any further, and most of the time he even succeeded. But with Angel away in Sri Lanka, fantasizing about him somehow didn't seem quite as inappropriate (although it should have, considering the circumstances) as it would have been while sharing an office, and during those hot Californian summer nights he played out more than a few variations of this scene in his mind, naked and sweaty and coming in his hand so hard it leaves his body shaking and his mind blissfully blank for a moment.

It was a change from watching the flicker of the neon advertisements and the headlights chase each other across the wall.

He knew better than waste time trying to forget or rationalise, or attempting to reconstruct mental boxes – watcher, vampire - that had become meaningless too long ago already. Self-knowledge, however uncomfortable or ultimately futile it might be, cannot be unlearned; it can only packaged and stowed away where it is least likely to do harm.

He promised himself to stop once Angel returned. He kept that promise.

o**o**o

Wesley stifles a yawn, turning back a page he has no memory of reading. The lines are beginning to blur, and he's never been fluent in this particular language. He closes his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate; he can't afford any mistakes. Their family is his responsibility, too.

And yet, somehow, he's become a watcher again, standing slightly apart, observing this travesty of a happy, normal life, Angel and Cordy drawing closer together, family within the family, Fred and Charles holding Connor, as if he were just another baby, not part of a mystical convergence, the result of an unnatural birth hardly deserving the name, cleansed from his mother's scanty remains by the pouring rain.

It haunts him, the eerie beauty of this unnatural, inverted Nativity scene in a squalid alley; Angel, the baby cradled in his coat, and Fred beside him, the light of the flames of the burning Caritas flickering across their wet faces, Holtz's crossbow trained on Angel shielding the child with his body, frozen in a pose of wholly uncharacteristic helplessness; his own heart stopping, panicked thoughts racing through his head, Angel dust like Darla, Fred dead with an arrow through her heart, until, finally, impossibly, the crossbow is lowered and they're in the car, speeding towards a questionable safety. The memory keeps him in this office, long into the night, trying to put together the pieces of this puzzle, prophecies, apocalypses and impossible vampire pregnancies, while he watches Angel and the others buy a crib, diapers, baby clothes and toys and make plans for Connor's future, a normal future including football and bicycles, college-funds and a dog, unable to part-take or entirely shake off an unease he feels almost guilty to acknowledge, as if thereby he was somehow inadvertently tainting their happiness, when he wants nothing more than to be part of it.

And why not, a voice within him taunts, why not grasp the piece of normality the strange world they live in seems to offer. Replace an impossible dream with a more probable one, put his demons behind him, his suspicions, his doubts. Fred has forgiven him; perhaps he, too, will be allowed to forgive himself in time.

Yet he feels reluctant to act, constrained and unsure whether he should dare give in to the temptation of her sweet face and the comfort of her trust and reassurance; he's learned long ago to suspect his dreams and wishes, and ever since (_he almost killed--_) (_Billy_) and Darla stepped into the hotel, it is almost as if what control he believed he had over his life is being taken from him piece by piece. He wakes from dreams that probably are nightmares but always elude him and leave him with a subtle sense of dread that all of them are pawns in some complex game of powers still unnamed and unseen, concealed in the shadows waiting to make a move that may mean death for any or all of them. He'll get up, struggling and failing to retain at least an image, determined to finally broach the subject of the questions they all should be asking, but then he sees Angel smile at his son, holding him with such infinite care and tenderness, and once again tries to dismiss his anxiety as paranoia, the result of working with too many prophecies.

He knows he's stalling, but he suspects his own motives.

In the meantime he spends much of his time gathering information - if he were to be honest, not the least because he's always found it to be a calming activity, following footnotes and obscure references from book to book, patiently waiting for that final, inevitable moment of clarity when apparently disparate pieces of knowledge fall together and reveal the bigger picture, disclosing both the problem and its solution. Cordelia and Charles, even Angel _(not Fred, never Fred)_,tease him about his books and the trust he puts in them, and although it's a kind, friendly mockery - a difference he recognises and never fails to appreciate - he still is at a loss how to respond, because they don't know, shouldn't know, about those years when books were the only safe and quiet place in his life, offering answers, dreams and promises of power and escape. Even his father had approved of his fondness for reading, although rarely of his choice of books…

And his thoughts are drifting again; a glance at his watch tells him it's past two o'clock; the stubble on his face makes him wonder what day it is and how long he's been sitting here over books that most people – _normal_ people – don't even know exist.

The hotel is silent and dark beyond the pool of lamplight around his desk; a quiet night, undisturbed by either visions or phone calls, and whatever evil undoubtedly is brewing out there seem to have decided to give them a short break at least. Angel had fed Connor and taken him upstairs hours ago; everyone else had left not long after, and maybe, he thinks, all of a sudden feeling restless and irritated with himself, he should have gone with them, and asked Fred if she wanted to have a drink with him somewhere, and maybe she'd -- But the passage had seemed promising, although it had turned out to be yet another dead end, and they'd shouted good night, and he'd immersed himself in Settembrini's long-winded prose again.

With a sigh and more force than strictly necessary he closes Leverkuehn's _Apocalypsis_ and puts his notes away; he will accomplish nothing tonight and tomorrow will be soon enough for talking to Angel.

And perhaps…

Perhaps, too, tomorrow, he will ask Fred for dinner, or would she prefer something less formal?

His footsteps echo through the silent lobby, and the door of the Hyperion swings shut behind him, as Wesley steps out into the night.


End file.
